Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Have you ever immediately wishlisted a game on Steam based on aesthetics alone? I ask because that’s just happened to me with All Living Things, a stop-motion game inspired by The Ripley Scroll, a 15th-century alchemical manuscript. Doesn’t that just seem like a guaranteed feast for the eyes? Developer MOXO self-describes it as an “animated art-book puzzle game”, which feels perfectly apt for it. The general presentation is simple, this strange, alluring art book on a black background waiting for you to click around.

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Lightyear Frontier launched into early access a little over a year ago, and it generally seems to have trudged along reasonably well since then. It’s not quite ready for 1.0 just yet, but a new update was announced by developers Frame Break and Amplifier Studios earlier this week that sounds like it’ll be bringing in some much needed changes.

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I wasn’t expecting it personally, but it seems like the new hotness is Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, ‘ey? Sure, it’s from a studio like Level-5, who’ve made massive games from Yo-kai Watch to Professor Layton. I just didn’t expect a sequel to a 3DS game from over a decade ago to do so well. In fact, it appears Level-5 is so happy with how much money everyone’s given them, it’ll be giving away a free bit of DLC for the RPG at some point in the future.

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Memorial Day weekend is here and the sales seem to be spilling out even for PC gamers. To be fair, these sales are typically a great time to find a reasonable discount on the latest gaming PCs, laptops, and everything else. While it’s not as dramatic as, say, Black Friday or Prime Day, there are still some proper savings to be had if you know where to look.

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Summerfall Studios co-founder and former Dragon Age writer David Gaider has been reflecting, not for the first time, on his career at BioWare under EA. In a brisk recap of a decade-and-change of sequels, changes of direction, and mid-project reboots, he sums up EA’s difficulty with Dragon Age as basically one of having no real faith in the wide appeal of role-playing games.

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Stop Killing Games are a self-described consumer movement who are aggrieved about all the games with online requirements that become partly or completely unplayable, once publishers end official server support. They’re trying to persuade larger advocacy organisations like The European Consumer Organisation to propose new laws that put a stop to such shenanigans.

To support their campaign, they’ve carried out a survey of games with online requirements to work out how many are “dead”, dying or enduring thanks to developer or fan-implemented “end of life” plans, such as patched-in offline functionality. The resulting Google spreadsheet has 738 entries, of which a whopping 70% are apparently no longer playable or destined to become that way.

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An Elden Ring live action film is in the works from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, film production company A24 and game publisher Bandai Namco. It’s not clear whether developers From Software are involved, but Game Of Thrones novelist George R. R. Martin – who worked on Elden Ring’s story and characters alongside From boss Hidetaka Miyazaki – is contributing as a producer. All of this comes via Deadline.

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If you are in the mood to play Skyrim or the recent Oblivion remaster, but you don’t want to play a Microsoft-backed game for, oh, any number of reasons, the word on the grapevine is that open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is pretty decent. We don’t have a review as yet, but Khee Hoon Chan called Questline’s previous Tainted Grail: Conquest one of the best games you missed in 2021, and The Fall Of Avalon is currently humming along with an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam user consensus as it prepares to leave early access today. The Steam page also harbours a demo, plus the below, moderately thunderous trailer’s worth of first-person spellcraft, shattered cosmic castles and fishing mechanics.

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Alkahest looks very good. Emphasis on ‘looks’ because both trailers released so far have been very scripted. Also, emphasis on ‘good’ because you get to bully goblins with your feet. It’s an open world RPG boasting a combat sandbox full of the sort of reactive flourishes you might find in an immersive sim. Crucially for fans of Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic (I’ve seen the words “spiritual successor” floating about, although not from the devs themselves) one of those touches is a boot. Here’s the boot in action:

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The Six One Indie Showcase is a bit of a new kid on the block when it comes to video game presentations, but it’s certainly working hard to justify itself. Early today the latest showcase was held showing off a huge range of indies, 48 in total, some of them being brand new reveals, others smaller showcases.

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